Saveliy is highly suspicious that his wife, Raisa is a witch. She is constantly luring people into their poverty-ridden house, under the pretence of shelter from a storm, in order to seduce them. His suspicions seem to be confirmed as a mailman and his coachman appear at their doorway, unable to contend with the harsh winds outside. Bursting with dialogue, and modelled on the real-life, secluded church that fascinated Chekhov himself, the tale of this sexton and his reluctant wife is widely considered to be one of Chekhov’s most successful short stories.
A prolific writer of seven plays, a novel and hundreds of short stories, Anton Chekhov (1860 -1904) is considered to be a master of the short story as a genre. His detailed and often miserable descriptions of everyday Russian life speak to his own experiences, and his characters drift between humour, melancholy, artistic ambition and death, no matter their storyline. In his plays, he tends to dramatize and explore social and existential problems, whilst his short stories focus more on the horror present in everyday life, and the mystery that cloaks monotony. The majority of his popular plays, such as ‘Uncle Vanya’, ‘The Seagull’, and ‘A Hunting Accident’ have been adapted into movies, giving fans of his literature a fresh avenue to explore his perspectives.